People assume our competitors are the logos — HubSpot, Salesforce, Monday, QuickBooks. They're not, mostly. The tool the average small business actually runs on, the one we're really up against, has no sales team and no marketing budget and is already installed everywhere: the spreadsheet. Underestimating it is the most common mistake software companies make.
Why the spreadsheet wins so often.
It wins because it's infinitely flexible, free, and instantly available. When a business hits a new problem on a Tuesday, nobody evaluates vendors — somebody opens a spreadsheet and solves it by Wednesday. No procurement, no onboarding, no learning curve. The spreadsheet meets you exactly where you are and bends to your exact shape. That's a genuinely great product, and any tool that pretends otherwise is going to lose to it.
The spreadsheet always wins the first round. It loses the round nobody schedules: the one where it quietly becomes load-bearing and then breaks.
Where the spreadsheet quietly fails.
The flexibility that makes it great is also how it fails. The spreadsheet has no idea what a “customer” is, so it can't stop you from entering the same one three ways. It has no permissions, so the intern can delete the formula that runs payroll. It doesn't connect to anything, so it becomes an island the whole business secretly depends on. And it has no memory of who changed what, so when it breaks — and the load-bearing one always breaks — nobody can say how.
We see it in nearly every migration: somewhere in the company is a spreadsheet that runs something critical, maintained by one person, understood by no one else, one bad paste away from chaos. It worked beautifully right up until the business outgrew it without noticing.
How to actually beat it.
You don't beat the spreadsheet by being more rigid than it — that's what most “proper” software gets wrong, trading the spreadsheet's flexibility for structure nobody asked for. You beat it by keeping the flexibility and adding the things it can't have: a real notion of customers and records, permissions, a shared data layer, an audit trail, and connections to the rest of the business. Be as adaptable as the spreadsheet and as safe as a system.
We respect the spreadsheet. It's the most successful business software ever made, and it'll be in every company forever for the things it's genuinely best at. We just think the parts of your business that became load-bearing deserve a system that won't break from one wrong paste — one that kept everything you loved about the spreadsheet and dropped the part that keeps you up at night.